Excerpt: AS WE FALL THROUGH TIME by Claire North

Chapter 1

The time traveller met Olivier at Madame Pelassier’s soirée.

The year was 1789, and an icy winter was about to crack the boiling enthusiasm of the summer fires, a cold lance across the hot thrill of revolution. Olivier wore his uniform, all starched white and gleaming gold, and said: “But what does it even mean, an oath to the king?”

The time traveller wore a dark blue waistcoat and knee-length cream breeches. Today he was male, for ease of pursuing his goals; tomorrow she might be female again, taking a break from the company of the philosophers who knew the answers to everything, as only a certain kind of frock-coated gentleman can. His clot-coloured hair was hidden beneath an only slightly anachronistic wig; brown eyes laughed from an autumnal face that in the realms of art would have been sculpted by an apprentice on their first day on the job. His ears were a bit too large, sockets a bit too deep, nose too wide, cheeks a little too sallow, resulting in an oversized gauntness that the charitable called “characterful” and a fashion designer in 2008 had dubbed “so ugly as to be enthralling, my dear.”

He was shorter than most people in the room, and striking in certain absences—absent the usual pox marks, limps from a poorly set bone, loose goitres and so on that were the background, chronic, low-level hum of most of human history. Absent too was the usual smell of sweat, powder and the pungent oils used to try and mask these medical odours. Instead, if one had deigned to stick one’s snout into an offending armpit, one might have caught the faintest whiff of papaya-scented bubble bath.

The time traveller’s name was Cal, and when he spoke French, it was with an accent that he pretended was Swiss—no one minded the Swiss. He smiled and bobbed and said “oh how interesting” and drank the surprisingly good wine on offer—and in this manner drifted into Olivier’s orbit just in time to hear the young soldier proclaim:

“If a king is appointed by God, then are we not swearing our allegiance to the divine? Should our politicians all be priests?”

The room tittered—it was an age for tittering. Questions were being asked that a few years ago would have resulted in punishment far stricter than the indignation of an elder gentleman as he exclaimed: “One land, one crown—this is how wars are won!”

Beneath his powdered wig, Olivier’s closely cropped hair was a fluff of ash brown. His eyes, owl-like in a face of low hills and soft valleys, were two green-grey baubles caught in an expression of perpetual wonder that his lived experience did not merit. He spent the vast majority of his days trying to source salted pork and fresh hay for the garrison, and tried to mask the scent of manure with a withering pomander of dried orange he kept in a pocket. He was twenty-seven years old, and had disappointed his father—the owner of a wallpaper factory near Nantes—by joining the army with a dashing cry of: “But is one’s duty to one’s country not greater even than the duty owed to the father?”

Duty had been the watchword when Olivier was growing up. Of course his father had meant duty to the family and unquestioning devotion to the mysteries of wallpaper—but as with so many parental good intentions, things had gotten out of hand.

“What use a king when his ears are poisoned by courtiers and Austrian wives?” chimed a lady in fern green and powder pink who liked to cause trouble, if only to remind people that she was here, in this room, still alive.

“Kings are but men,” another agreed.

“Men are but men—what is your point?”

“If the National Assembly called on you to arrest your king, would you do it?”

“One could argue that the National Assembly already has…”

“Peasants! Sans-culottes! Street-rabble.”

“Darling, there are more of them than there are of us…”

And as the men and women of this new age bickered beneath the drooping candlelight of the crystal-glittering room, the time traveller listened, smiled politely and said hardly anything at all. This is the common condition of most time travellers during events of massive political upheaval. They stand on the sideline while people—honest, good people who do not know the hurricane is about to blow—are buffeted by a history that, to the traveller, has already ended. The storm passes and these gossipers are merely footnotes in a book; just another breeze, the traveller seems to say. Just another cloud passing across the sky.

Olivier, however, did not care for quiet onlookers. It was an age of new men and grand conventions, and thus, seeing Cal quiet in the corner of his eye, he turned and blurted: “What do you think?”

Cal rolled the stem of his glass in his hand, considered the reflected candlelight dancing across the ceiling, gazed down at the floor, then met the soldier’s eye and said: “In my experience, the more men talk of big ideas and grand, divine designs, the more likely they are to fire grapeshot into their peers for getting in the way.”

Scoff, scoff, said some, scoff and tush!

But Olivier just stared at the time traveller as if seeing straight through his puffy white sleeves, his silken cravat and aura of polite respectability, right down to his rather anachronistic breathable cotton underpants. Cal smiled, held his gaze, and for a little while audible conversation continued about them while an inaudible dialogue passed between the two men, until someone on Olivier’s right said something that was too fantastically pig-headed for the young man to let pass.

In the street outside, in the brittle-boned darkness of the Paris night, Olivier says his farewells at the same time Cal does, and it is an accident, but not an unhappy one. “Where are you headed?” he asks the traveller, and Cal briefly struggles to reply.

“Well, I was going to that patch of wall over there, which will still be standing in 2018 and thus presents an adequate loci of temporal travel. Then I was going to either walk through a decade with decent street lighting or get the Métro to my perfectly pleasant four-star hotel just off rue de Bretagne”—did not our time traveller say?

Instead: “Le Marais,” he blurted, in the face of Olivier’s polite stare. “I am staying with a friend.”

“Ah—my rooms are not so far from there. Do you have a lantern?” Cal does not. Cal had not planned on sticking around in 1789 long enough to need one. Olivier tuts at him—actually tuts like the little officer he is, rising fast through rapidly thinning ranks—then holds up his freshly burning light and says, “Well then, I will accompany you.”

Olivier, for all that he is a lieutenant, does not have much in the way of disposable income, and rather unfashionably walked to Madame Pelassier’s. His father would have been mortified, but Olivier is unafraid of censure, vagabonds and those who have been so emboldened by the word “revolution” as to think that it extends to “do what you want, to whom you want, whenever the shadows are deep enough”. In other words, he is recklessly confident with a sword, despite having barely ever used it.

Cal, he thinks, does not look confident with a sword, although he would be surprised—both by Cal’s proficiency, acquired from a Dutch master who’d served in the armies of both France and Austria and was very pragmatic about the art of cutting hands, and by the pepper spray he carried in his pocket, another anachronism for a traveller far from home.

Cal hesitates, face half cast in the light of Olivier’s lantern.

He should say no, utter a polite “Ah, but I have forgotten my hat!” or some other feeble excuse. Manners are not always a concern to a time traveller, who knows—oh how they know—that today’s conversationalist will be, is already, has already died, their name written in some dusty archive to be perused a few centuries from now. Then again, Cal has travelled enough to have come to realise that there is a real beauty in the here and now, a wonder to be found in those who live it, for whom then is now and now is everything, and though sometimes he forgets, tonight he looks at Olivier…

…and he remembers.

And for a moment he looks at Olivier, and Olivier looks at him, and Cal thinks there is…

…something.

A little more than courtesy in the corner of the soldier’s eye.

They walk through the night, at a pace that is absolutely perfect for a mugging, chatting as if they were out for a springsome frolic in the fields south of Saint-Marcel. Which is not to say that Olivier’s eyes do not flicker to the shadows, nor his hand rest upon the hilt of his blade. He is a soldier, and a soldier’s duty is to protect others, even—if not especially—when they appear to be a naive Swiss, far from home.

And what is home? Olivier asks.

Ah, mountains, Cal lies, snow in winter brighter than any summer’s sun, lakes bluer than the sky, skiing…

Skiing?

Cal swallows as if he could gulp the guilty word back down his throat. Yes, people have been strapping big bits of wood to their feet to bimble across snow for millennia—but the name, the idea, is not going to start entering the popular imagination of Europe for a few decades yet…

“A kind of game we play, like winter skating on a frozen lake, only with snow.”

“I see,” says Olivier, and doesn’t really.

The last time Cal was actually in Switzerland was 1928, but that was decades ago (in centuries yet to come) and he briefly regrets that he was so blasé about his visit to this era that he didn’t bother to pop over to Geneva to do the bare minimum of research. Getting a little sloppy, Cal. Getting a little too casual about dropping into an age of fire.

“And what brings you to Paris?” Olivier asks, and he is genuinely curious in a way that in just a few years will be a trap of a question muttered by angry men with tricolour sashes and grey, hungry lips.

“I am a dealer in antiquities. Ancient artefacts—Roman coins and blades, unusual paintings, the lost jewels of Charlemagne, that kind of thing.”

The word “archaeologist” has absolutely not entered the local lexicon yet, but everyone understands a yearning for the past, for fantastical glory days when kings were strong, bold, wise and possessed of spectacularly bushy beards.

“I came to Paris,” Cal adds, a little less enthusiastically, “looking for something very unusual—an item really quite remarkable and also utterly banal. I had hoped Madame Pelassier would have some information regarding it, but I fear I have got my timings wrong.”

“It seems to me,” proclaims Olivier, with a pomposity truly enhanced by this being a year for proclamations, “that the difference between the extraordinary and the banal comes largely down to the opinions of rich men and their lackeys, rather than any intrinsic quality of the thing.”

Cal considers this point a while, then shrugs—a decidedly un-revolutionary gesture. “To a degree, I think you are correct. For great sweeps of human history, what we would call ‘art’ has been paid for by people with wealth, and frequently an agenda. So many paintings of the Virgin Mary where in the background the minor lordling who commissioned it can be seen in the guise of a wise man holding myrrh. So many portraits of rich gentlemen and their heirs, hands resting on the surface of the globe as if to say ‘all this is mine’. Power and wealth have been inextricably entangled with art, arguably impossible to really separate from the end aesthetic.”

Olivier brightens at this and is right on the cusp of proclaiming something along the lines of “Ah, but the songs of the peasants!”—but thankfully Cal misses the cue, and thus we are saved.

“However,” the time traveller continues, half lost now to his contemplations, “when you strip away the power, the politics, the money—sometimes the blood too, the plundering and the exploitation—behind every object ever made are real human hands. Fingers that held the brush or pressed the clay or dipped enamel between turns of copper foil. The touch of the craftsman, the thing itself, will always outlast the ego of the rich dead man who commissioned it.”

“I think we shall make a new kind of art, no?” Olivier muses, as they drift through the distant clatters of an unquiet night. “An art made for the people, not the nobility?”

He says “nobility” because he is not yet comfortable with the idea of damning his king. The king is merely misled, surrounded by corrupting sorts—not yet a villain. Not yet.

A while longer they walk, Olivier leading the way through the shuttered streets by foot-memory, legs carrying them through the leaning dark of wooden buildings trying to kiss the roofs of their opposite neighbours in their downward slouches, of muddy roads piss-smeared and bridges of cracked stone. It is easy to forget how small so many great cities of this era are, how closely lean the fire-touched tenements and bending houses where families huddle nine to a room, pressed between the new factories of curtain makers and pot beaters and plate painters and the old convents and the stone villas of rich and oblivious men. Easy too to forget how dark the darkness can be, when the skies are blotted out by slate and spire, candlelight rationed among the slumbering poor. Cal is grateful for Olivier’s navigation—grateful too, in a way, to be experiencing this night through the eyes of a local, to walk without fear in a place that a traveller, no matter how experienced, might hesitate to go.

Olivier says: of course, I swore an oath to a king, but the king swore an oath to his people, and what is the value of an oath to an oathbreaker?

And Cal answers in careful little words, holding back the secrets of times to come, which caution Olivier mistakes for a gift, an invitation to say things that are embarrassing in their uncertainty. This is an age of strong opinions loudly held—doubt is an unwelcome guest.

And Olivier says: when I joined the army, I imagined it was glory and brotherhood and heroic battling against France’s enemies, but all my commanders are gentlemen from fine families who dine off silver plates while I haggle over the price of flour for the men. I thought that if I worked hard and proved my worth, I would be seen, but they hear me speak and it is as if in that moment I vanish.

And Olivier says: of course we need change, of course we do, but there is no guide, no map, no holy text to show us the way, how are we to know? How are men to decide these things that should be in the hands of a just and merciful God?

And Olivier whispers: I am scared, truly I am, of the things that are to come. Of the things I may be asked to do.

If given the order to fire on his own people, would he obey it?

If he did not obey, would he be a hero or a mutineer, and would he die, and what good would that do? Someone else would pull the trigger—but not him.

Not him.

Would it count for anything that one man said no to a tyrant’s command? Would anyone remember him for his courage, or would his be a pointless, vainglorious death that changed nothing in the great sweep of history?

Cal considers this question for a while, then says: how many women marched on Versailles? When the women forced the king to come down from his palace, how many were there? What is the absolute minimum number it would have taken to achieve their ends? A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? Every act of change consists of individuals, and most of the time they are afraid. Perhaps you would die, alone and unremembered—or perhaps you would be one of the many that became a mass that became the whole. You’ll never know, until you stand.

Olivier nods, just once, brisk, a soldier who knows in his heart that this is true, that this is what a soldier is, and on they walk.

“Do you have anyone waiting for you?” Cal breathes, voice like mist in the dark. “At home, I mean.”

“No.”

“No wife, no…”

“No. I am… I am not inclined to have a wife.” A little further and then: “Are you?” Olivier’s voice is a snap-shot of powder, a little too loud, hastily hushed. “Are you that way inclined?”

“I incline several different ways,” Cal replies. “Though at this present time I am… unaffiliated.”

The River Seine does not yet stink of the pure, putrescent sewage that will define its muddy shores in years to come—but that doesn’t mean you’d want to swim in it. The moon is nearly full, a brief respite of silver light drifting through the cracks in the crooked buildings. Le Marais is a district of stone and glass, but it has fallen on hard times, will soon fall on far worse, a few pinpoints of firelight still flickering in the windows, a heavy slam of a heavy door, the scrape of iron as it is barred shut. Olivier lives at the top of a crumbling house in a single room owned by a widow, because an officer should have his own rooms, and does not invite people into it, and is a little ashamed of its sparse, artless interior.

“I am here,” he says, and does not invite Cal inside.

“Well,” Cal replies. Then: “Thank you for your company.”

“Do you know where you are going from here?”

“Oh yes, absolutely.”

“I can escort you…”

“Not at all. I will be fine, please, I assure you.”

“Very well. It has been… interesting… a pleasure, I mean.”

“Likewise.”

And for a moment more, they stand before each other, their eyes glinting in the thin reflected light of the moon, mouths blanketed in shadow, hands lost to the dark.

“Well,” Cal says at last, and turns away, just as…

“Would you join me for a drink?” Olivier stutters, and Cal stops, and turns back, and looks the soldier up and down with a slow tilt of his head, as if trying to piece out every part of him from the thick midnight black. “My rooms are not… but I have wine, it is not very good but it is… if you would care to join me? For just… just a little while.”

For a moment, Cal does not answer. Perhaps he is considering the risk, the dangers, the thrill of the invitation. Perhaps not. Perhaps he is contemplating Olivier’s age, the vast centuries between them, the hypocrisy of his lies, the consequences of his actions upon time itself—always, consequences, and yet at the same time, always none. His contemplations last just long enough for Olivier to deflate and tense all at once, a soul-crushing calamity settling on his bones—

—but then again, Cal thinks, everyone is young compared to me…

“Thank you,” he says, just as Olivier prepares to curl up and die like a shameful child caught stealing custard. “I would like that.”

Chapter 2

The second time Cal met Olivier was in the grey spring of 1793, the day after Madame Pelassier was guillotined.

Olivier found him in the shuttered shell of the madame’s home, picking through her desk. The candles had burned down and not been replaced, the gowns of yesteryear hidden in a trunk beneath the bed, the shutters cracked and drawn across the high windows. Olivier now wore blue instead of white and gold, a picked-together uniform of bits acquired here and there, scuffed knee-high boots and no wig upon his head. He walked both taller and lower, shoulders squared, ready for a proud salute, chin birding forward as if struggling against a weight upon his back. When he saw Cal, he did not immediately recognise him, incongruity rather than time having marred his features, and he drew his sword and called: “You! Face me!”

Cal jumped, papers scattering from his fingers as he turned, and then, squinting in the shadowed gloom of the once-singing house, said: “Olivier?”

A little intake of breath, then a moment that became more than a moment, a too-long drag of quiet before Olivier replied: “Cal? What are you… what are you doing here?”

“I’m… I’m looking for something. An item. Madame Pelassier left notes in an archive… not an archive, that’s not…”

“How did you get in? The doors are locked.”

Cal got in the way Cal usually does with locked doors—he waited for a discreet moment when they were open, perhaps last week, perhaps next year, stepped through, then pressed his fingers to the wall and let the weight of history, the gravity of their time, carry him back to when he wanted to be, now inside the house. He tries to find a less chronologically chaotic way to express this, and his mouth works on empty air.

“You should not be poking in the house of the dead, sir,” and that “sir” is a half-growl, a spiked fence of black iron between them. “You should not be here.”

Olivier strides forward, snatches the papers from Cal’s hands. The thin sheets hold the words of a dead woman, ink sprinkled like blood across the crowds that cheered by the guillotine. Having grabbed them, he immediately throws them aside, draws himself up to lean, a little taller, a little broader, over the decidedly shrinking Cal. “What possible reason could you have to come here?” he barks, and almost immediately has the revelation. “Are you still picking after your antiquities? Are you… foraging like a damned crow?”

“I… I heard about her execution. I was sad to hear it…”

“She was proclaimed a traitor to the revolution. A royalist, a reactionary, a…”

“Olivier, I…”

“You should go, sir. You should leave now, and be thankful that it is I who found you here, rather than any other who might call you a thief.”

Cal tries to shape some words, some apology, some mumbled, “But I…”

It has been over three years since Cal and Olivier shared a night in Paris, and all that it entailed.

It has been two and a half days.

“Go! Get out! Get out!”

Olivier is shaking; his voice is raised, not quite a shout, but the battlefield roar with which you tell your men to prime their guns, as the first thunder of the cannon crashes. It is the hold, hold, hold of an officer who knows that the line is going to break and cannot scream the command and make it true, cannot sob it, cannot wail as the world is torn apart, so simply…

…raises his voice, and keeps on marching.

Cal sees this in Olivier, sees something perhaps of the field at Neerwinden, of the dysentery tents and the limb-lopping tents, and wonders where in two and a half days (in three and a half years) the young man he knew has gone.

He mumbles something, an inaudible apology, and scurries downstairs, arms empty, eyes down. In the street, Cal looks left, looks right, cannot remember which of the nearest walls are suitable loci for travel, picks one at random—he doesn’t need to go far after all, just a few years away from here, a few months away from this moment—

And as he moves, Olivier’s voice rings out behind him again.

“Cal,” he says, and perhaps it is something of the officer in him, but Cal stops, obeys the snap-crack of command in his tone. The soldiers of Olivier’s regiment go to war dressed in whatever they can find, march without boots and fight with muskets stolen from their grandfathers. His major and his colonel and his general all left France when the king was guillotined, fled to Austria and raised men to fight against their country—fight for, they would say—and now Olivier is not sure what epaulettes to wear and which responsibilities are his and which are not, and he has killed men. In the chaos when the column collapses, in the mad rush to flee the field—he has done this thing, and he knows it will make no difference, and he thinks France will lose this war. What does this make him, who spilled so much blood for a cause that is lost?

“Cal,” he repeats, a little softer, dropping the stiffness of his spine just a touch. “It’s not safe in Paris. It’s not safe. You should not be here. If anyone else had found you… You’re not even French.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I was following… But you’re right. Of course. I will leave.”

“Good. That is… good.”

“I… I was sad. To hear about Madame Pelassier.” This is something of a lie. Cal first knew of Madame Pelassier as a collection of letters written by a young woman full of gossip, joy, scandal, then by a slightly older woman, worrying about the price of bread, and then finally scratched with clawed fingers from a cell she shared with ten others, waiting for death. Madame Pelassier had been, to Cal, a walking ghost long before she was beheaded, and meeting her had only slightly shaken the reality of her incoming demise.

Olivier looks away from Cal’s wide brown eyes, nods just once in acknowledgement of… of something. Of some flicker of humanity, some puppetry of regret expressed in an age when both are in short supply.

And then, a question blurted at nothing, a lock-jawed, eyes-fixed-elsewhere enquiry as light as smoke from the blasted cannon. “You have been… well?”

“I… Yes.”

It has been three and a half years.

It has been two and a half days.

“And you?” Cal stumbles over the question, embarrassed to have been caught napping on it for so long. “I mean… you are well?”

“I. I am well. Yes. Well.” Then, a thing that has burned, that he never thought he would get to say: “You left. Without a word. You left.”

“I… Yes. I’m sorry. I thought… I thought it would be more appropriate, I thought it was what… what you wanted…”

“You did not ask me what I wanted.”

“I… No. I did not. That was wrong of me. To assume. I’m sorry.”

Cal wonders if Olivier’s name is written on a monument to soldiers, if it’s in some archive, a military list preserved through the centuries. Perhaps a flag will be hung in the tomb of Les Invalides in the centuries to come, something Olivier’s hand once touched—but no. I have visited the echoing vaults and stone-kissed tombs, and I am confident that there will be no plaque to this young man, no statue to commemorate his dignity. Nearly all those who die in war die forgotten.

Now Olivier is the glacier; now Olivier is ice-cracked stone. “Well,” he grunts. “No. It was badly done. I did not think I would see you again.”

“Nor I you.”

“Well. Done now.”

“Yes. I suppose it is.”

Here is the place where Cal should say: “But is it, though? But is it? Should you and I not walk as we did all those days—all those years—all that time ago? Should we not talk, with the ease of strangers? I look at your face and I see so much time has passed. Would you not spare a minute of it with me? Olivier—Olivier—look at me—Olivier—remember there was a moment, a lovely moment where I was completely in the present and so were you, do you know how precious that is, how much that means…?”

But Olivier is already turning away, in case Cal sees the breaking in his eyes. “Stay safe, citizen,” he barks, and marches back into the house of a dead woman, and slams the door shut behind him. Meanwhile, at the end of the world, a different time traveller turns to his other self and says: “No.”

In this way, reality shatters, the fabric of time and space torn apart in a way that is really rather spectacular in its violence, albeit not the intended outcome at all.

Chapter 3

A hotel room in Paris, in 2033.

Cal enjoys a hot shower to wash away the stench of the past; pads around in big fluffy slippers, drinks fresh juice while gazing out across the electric lights of the city, the glittering gold of a thousand thousand thousand points of illumination reflected across the fat snake of the Seine, and contemplates the wonders of digitisation.

He watches the news, and instantly turns away to watch something else, and then realises he isn’t watching it at all.

He brushes his teeth, and momentarily remembers to be fantastically grateful for modern dentistry. He hums a tune, and isn’t sure where he heard it, then remembers that it was sung in the streets of Paris several centuries ago, earlier this afternoon, and it is a song of hope and rage compressed into a ditty in a major key that dies on his lips as soon as he places it.

He paces back and forth, unable to sleep, time-lagged.

No, he thinks.

No.

Come on.

Don’t be silly.

He sprawls out on a cotton bed stacked with pillows, thinks about ordering something to eat—ramen, perhaps, or smoked salmon straight from a Norwegian fjord—and finds his thoughts drifting back again to digitisation in all its glories.

Come on now, he thinks.

Come on.

Let’s not do anything absurd, let’s not do something daft that might have consequences, let’s not…

…but too late.

He reaches for his mobile phone, and in a few taps of finger across glowing screen is on the landing page of the Vincennes Historical Archives. It takes a while to find the records for Olivier. He is not a man of great importance, and for a little while Cal contemplates popping down to the archives in person and having a good old-fashioned papery rummage.

Then he finds him.

Reads what little there is.

Says: “Oh.”

Thinks about the situation for a while.

Says: “Bollocks.”

Thinks about it a little longer.

Says: “Terrible idea,” but is already heading down to the hotel laundry in dressing gown and slippers to see if his stockings have dried.